SHARCNET's supercomputer-in-a-box

Compiled with material from David McCaughan, HPTC Consultant, SHARCNET

SHARCNET has developed a portable Supercomputer-in-a-Box in order to cultivate wider awareness of what high performance computing (HPC) has to offer to the more general Canadian academic community. Representatives from SHARCNET took the machine on a tour of southern Ontario over the spring and summer.

The SHARCNET Supercomputer-in-a-Box (SiB) is a portable cluster comprised of eight dualcore Apple Mac Minis, with an Ethernet interconnect and a MacBook Pro serving as the head node. Apple computers ship with software that simplifies the process of bringing up a working cluster through peer-based configuration, and the included Xgrid clustering software is well-suited to illustrating the load on the compute nodes dynamically.

SHARCNET's outreach goal is to demonstrate that HPC is no longer available only to those in specialized academic or industrial fields. Even inexpensive desktop hardware now provides multiple compute cores.

However, according to SHARCNET, the greatest challenge is providing compelling yet accessible examples of HPC in action that even audiences new to HPC can easily understand.

"SHARCNET has taken a number of steps to reach out to K-12 students, including the SiB tour," says Hugh Couchman, SHARCNET's Scientific Director. "This type of outreach is critical in order to demonstrate the potential of advanced and high-performance computing and to encourage students to think about pursuing careers in the growing range of disciplines that depend on the effective use of these technologies. The long-term uptake of computational techniques, necessary for the required economic outcomes for Ontario, requires that we reach out to high school students to inform them of the importance of considering not only science, but computational science."

On this year's tour, the Supercomputer-in-a-Box displayed a ray tracing application that makes use of the physics of light to render graphical images. Ray tracing produces extremely realistic images, but is computationally expensive making the effect of having many processors available to shoulder the load readily apparent to even a non-technical audience.

A graduate student is currently developing a more comprehensive demonstration framework for the SiB. A monitoring system is being deployed in conjunction with a custom-written application designed to provide a high degree of flexibility in terms of its run-time characteristics. Using this demonstration framework, it will be possible to use a graphical user interface to set the gross characteristics of the running job: demands on memory bandwidth, granularity of the parallelism (frequency of communication events in relation to computation performed) and memory footprint, among others. The monitoring framework will make it possible for a non-technical audience to readily visualize subtle concepts such as overhead implied by communication or efficiency of the network interconnect.

Read more at www.sharcnet.ca.


Back to Headlines